Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Back in September, because of one of those days where people cycle to raise money for charity round as many churches as they can, I was able at last to get inside a church I have ridden or driven past many times, the Church of St Nicholas in Hurst, Berkshire, just to the east of Reading. I must have had a notion that a church so consistently locked might have something inside worth seeing, and so it proved, a sensational set of monuments.

Chief among them is this extravaganza commemorating Lady Margaret Savile, who died at the age of 73 in 1631. She is in the centre, facing her third and most distinguished husband, Sir Henry Savile, Mathematician, Astronomer, Historian of Science, translator (in his lodgings at Merton, the '5th committee', responsible for the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelations in the King James Bible met, Savile's knowledge of Greek making him the only layman involved in the translation).

We can perhaps imagine the two of them are praying over open copies of the text he helped produce. Savile had died in 1622, Margaret had erected a monument to him in Merton College Chapel. The brochure available in the church cites Elias Ashmole as saying that there was formerly an infant in a cradle in front of them. The monument says she had two sons by Savile, who both died young.

To the left in this matriachal frieze are the figures on two of Margaret's daughters: Lady Anne Carleton (from her first marriage to George Garrard) and Lady Elizabeth Sidley, her daughter by Savile.

To the right are the figures of Lady Francis Harison, youngest of her daughters by her first husband, and her husband Sir Richard Harison of Hurst. The whole monument is here because Margaret wanted 'to deposite her body in the place where living she had found soe much content & soe sweet a repose in her age' - she had lived with this couple in Hurst in her final years.

The solidity of these figures, their prayerful calm, is offset by a great swagger of marble drapery, with angels and cherubs pulling aside or lifting the curtains to disclose this undramatic scene of family prayer:

Studded here and there are the shields that spell out the dynastic stuff, and further cartouches crown the whole structure, this monument that is almost a building

Urns, shields, tassels, strapwork, fringes, inscriptions, curlicues, ribbonwork, scrolls, swags: it is the very height of early 17th century taste, that taste for which the quip that 'less is more' never had any meaning: more is more.

It is Lady Margaret's own monument. It commemorates her three husbands, but depicts just the last (I guess it must be the case that while men can freely have themselves depicted between wives, a widow could not have a line-up of her late spouses without some indecorum of effect). Sir George Savile is not here given any particular allusions to point to his achievements in learning, the angels are not indicated to be allegorical. This stony splendour is a fossil of her taste. The impression one has of matrilineage is perhaps wrong: three daughters are indeed present, but we should remember that the top order of the monument did originally commemorate one of the lost infant sons, and the remaining five of Margaret's nine children (two male, three female) are in smaller and now headless effigies below the rank of inscriptions:

Sunday, December 15, 2013

“Had my parents
been so innocent as to have taught me this Doctrine in the time of my youth, I
had saved my skull from being cloven to the brain in the late War for the
Parliament against the King” …

The doctrine was
that of Isaiah 21, 2: “A grievous vision
was showed unto me, the transgressor against the transgressor, and the
destroyer against the destroyer”,
and the wounded man was Roger Crab, who (in what is for him an unusually
rational response) decided that he had seen enough of killing, and then
extended this revulsion against slaughter to a radical vegetarianism, in which
he imagined that the last days might arrive if predatory birds and animals gave
up their evil ways, and if men imitated Christ in their lives, rather than the
devil Mars:

“If all birds
would take the Dove for an example, and all beasts take the Lamb for their
example, and all men take Christ for their example, then MarsandSaturn,the two chief Devils would be trampled
under feet. Such a time is promised, but not yet.”

That a strict and
restricted vegetarian diet is a Christian obligation is evident to Crab from
the way the Fall of Man came about:

“If naturalAdamhad kept to his single natural fruits of
Gods appointment, namely fruits and herbs, we had not been corrupted. Thus we
see that by eating and drinking we are swallowed up in corruption”

Like other
traumatized veterans of war, Roger Crab took himself to intense study of the
Bible, and to a hermit’s existence. Society at large he simply sees as a
latter-day version of Sodom and Gomorrah, or a Jerusalem given over to
abomination, as Ezekiel saw it. He had owned a hat shop in Chesham: this he
wound up, gave away to the poor the greater part of his worldly goods and
vigorously set about a course of life designed to subdue the Old Adam. In the
words of his publisher, he

“now liveth atIcknam,nearUxbridge,one a small Rood of ground, for which
he payeth fifty shillings a year and hath a mean Cottage of his own building to
it; but that which is most strange and most to be admired, is his strange
reserved, and Hermetical kind of life, in refusing to eat any sort of flesh,
and saith it is a sin against his body and soul to eat flesh, or to drink any
Beer, Ale, or Wine; his diet is only such poor homely food as his own Rood of
ground beareth, as Corn, Bread, and bran, Herbs, Roots, Dock-leaves, Mallows,
and grass, his drink is water, his apparel is as mean also, he wears a
sackcloth frock, and no band on his neck: and this he saith is out of
conscience, and in obedience to that command of Christ”

Resolved to kill
no more, Crab set about killing ‘himself’, as the unregenerate Old Adam, though
he indeed also seems to have gone close to death by malnutrition – in his own
words:

“instead of
strong drinks and wines, I give the old man a cup of water; and instead of roast
Mutton, and Rabbets, and other dainty dishes, I gave him broth thickened with
bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnip leaves chopped together, and
grass; at which the Old man (meaning my body) being moved, would know what he
had done, that I used him so hardly; then I showed him his transgression as
aforesaid: so the wars began,The
law of the old man in my fleshly members rebelled against the law of my mind,and had a shrewd skirmish; but the
mind being well enlightened, held it, so that the old man grew sick and weak
with the flux, like to fall to the dust; but the wonderful love of God well
pleased with the Battle, raised him up again, and filled him full of love,
peace, and content in mind, and is now become more humble; for now he will eat
Dock-leaves, Mallows, or Grass, and yields that he ought to give God more
thanks for it, then formerly for roast flesh and wines”. He seems to have had a
small group of adherents, who he would later refer to as ‘the Rationals’, quite
a misnomer, for Captain Robert Norwood “began to follow the same poor diet till
it cost him his life”.

Poor Crab had
suffered a severe head injury, he had then worked as a hatter, and hatters seem
to have exposed themselves while working with felt to lots of mercury, and were
proverbially mad. Self-imposed privation would not have helped a desperate
situation – and, even if he was abstaining from strong drink, he was still consuming
quantities of the 100% proof madness that is the book of Ezekiel.

It is not
surprising to read that he took comfort when he discovered that the birds were
giving him messages direct from God:

“the most high
was pleased to convince me with natural forms, namely birds of the Air, which
every day brought me intelligence according to my worldly occasions; for almost
three years space I have observed them, for they would foretell me of any
danger or cross, or any joy from friends”.

Crab’s publisher
admits that he was a man of “strange opinions”, but, as he is trying to exploit
Crab and sell as many pamphlets about this hermit to the curious as possible,
the publisher tries to keep the focus on Crab’s ‘harmless’ opinions about
eating. But when one looks closer at what Crab says: “eating of flesh is an
absolute enemy to pure nature; pure nature being the workmanship of a pure God,
and corrupt nature under the custody of the Devil” one can sense in him a early
modern, home counties, version of the Catharist ‘pure’ – a dualist who believes
that the flesh must be held in contempt and defiled to demonstrate that
contempt.

Crab was believed
to have denied the immortality of the soul (the ODNB life cites Thomas Edwards’
Gangraena): but, really, he seems to express a notion that living too
fleshly a life will doom us to reincarnation in another low form of body “he
that dyeth with fleshly desires, fleshly inclinations, and fleshly satisfactions;
this being a composure of the spirits of darkness in this body, must rise again
in the same nature, and must be taken into the centre ofMars,the god of flesh, blood, and fire”.
Unless he can eliminate the Old Adam, he will be born again into the Civil War.
Satan has no role here, but is superseded by ‘Mars’, who rules over the hell
that Crab has already experienced once, the hell he must do everything to avoid
going back to.

Crab was
impossible to deal with: he was “well read in the Scriptures, he hath argued
strongly with several Ministers in the Country, about this and other strange
opinions which he holds”. Beneficed ministers – ‘hirelings’ as he calls them -
were most at risk. For Crab had actually followed some of Christ’s more radical
injunctions, especially Matthew 19:21. His publisher had tried one of the
interpretations that might be used to give a swerve to this tricky issue: “I
reasoned the case with him, & told him that I conceived Christ’s meaning
when he bade the young man sell all he had and give to the poor, was, that he
should part with all his dearest Sins, that were as dear to him as his
possessions”.

Not that Crab, as
much as a beneficed clergyman, wasn’t himself faced by difficult texts that
evidently contradicted his ideas – but he can prove with confident bluster that
an awkward text somehow means the exact opposite of what it apparently says:

“Now for the
objection in 1 Tim. 4. v.3.
where it saith thus;Forbidding
to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats which God hath created, to be
received with giving thanks of them which believe and know the truth:Andverse4. it saith;For every creature of God is good,
and nothing ought to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving.This Scripture being very useful for
the purpose, and will give much light to the adhearers to this opinion, and
conform them of sound principles within themselves; for whosoever shall forbear
marrying, or abstain from meat, from the commandment of men which pretends his
commands to be of God, all that are obedient hereunto will serve the Devil, and
must needs be without the spirit of sanctification; neither are they believers,
neither obey the Truth.”

He refutes
another objection to his principles about the evil of ingestion, based on
another Gospel verse, by a category switch:

“Another
Objection is alleged from that Scripture inMatthew15. 11. where he saith these words:That which goeth into the mouth
defileth not the man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, that defileth the
man, which is murthers, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies,
slanders,&c. If this be
meant that any thing put into the mouth cannot defile the body, then no man can
be poisoned.”

Crab considers
what Jesus actually chose to purvey by way of food as a most significant
example, while when Christ attended feasts and weddings, what He actually ate
and drank can be inferred: “let us see what Christ had at his feast with the
people, he being able tocommand
stones to be bread,orwater to be wine, was also
able to command roast Beef or pig: but he was to be exemplary to all people on
earth, in all his actions and doctrine, made an innocent feast for the people
with barley loaves and fishes … we never find that ever he was drunk, or eat
bit of flesh at any of their Feasts, or Wedding”.

Crab is mainly
pitiable – as in his closing rhymes:

If any would know
who is the Author,Or ask whose lines are these:I answer, one that drinketh water,And now a liver at ease.In drinking cannot be drunk,Nor am I moved to swear:And from wenching am I sunk,My bones are kept so bare.For it is the grossness of the fleshThat makes the soul to smart …

But as the gross
flesh withers away, the waistline of Crab’s ego expands – he is shaping up to
be a prophet, to be the Ezekiel England needs:

OEnglandthen repentFor the misery thou art in!Which have all by consent,Lived on each others sin.

To do him justice, Crab had worried about what would happen
to the economy if everyone ceased to ask for superfluous luxuries – nice hats,
roast beef, etc – wouldn’t a market collapse reduce tradesmen to being paupers?
But the moral imperative pushed him to the decision he made. Crab cites in
crazy fashion from Ezekiel’s crazy book: “Ezekieltook of wheat, barley, and beans, and
lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in a vessel, and made bread
thereof; and instead of butter and spice, he was to take cows dung, instead of
men’s dung, to prepare his bread with, and he was to have his portion by
weight,Ezek.4. 9.” Ezekiel is at this point preparing
his credentials as denouncer of sin in Jerusalem by lying on his left side for
390 days, and then on his right for 40 more. In the midst of these demanding
stipulations God tells him to bake his barley cakes using human dung, Ezekiel
protests that he has never eaten defiled food, and God concedes that he may
cook using dried cow dung instead. In Crab’s truncated version, Ezekiel seems
to use cow dung to spice the bread. I suspect
Crab may have had a go at coprophagy, on the grounds that if it was good enough
for God’s prophet, it was good enough for him.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

I was
asking my students to point out for me, or find for me if they could,
depictions of Adam and Eve by women artists prior to the nineteenth century
(I’d thought of Suzanne Valadon). My notion was that the subject was perhaps
one that involved too much naked man to be quite feasible for the woman artist
to undertake, at least until the 19th century.

But I
failed completely to think of one special category of female artist that
valiantly, methodically and with epic concentration undertook the subject time
and again: little girls working their samplers.

Why Adam
and Eve were so favoured as a design element in the sampler is worth pondering.
Paradise allowed lots of attendant animals, and they were fun to stitch. Adam
and Eve were part of children’s iconography – in part because their homes might
not feature much pictorial material (a less pious household might have some
ballad sheets with woodblock prints pasted up on the privy walls). But Adam and
Eve popped up everywhere – often they appear on title pages of Bibles. For the
German market at least, cut out and paste Genesis I-III pictures were
available.

One could
take a grave view of this, that the little daughters of Eve were being made to
focus on her role in bringing sin into the world. It is possible that some of
the earlier women writers about Adam and Eve – I am thinking of Lucy Aitken,
and possibly further back to women of the 17th century like Lucy
Hutchinson and Ester Sowernam - may have had to demonstrate their skill with the
needle in working Eve and her husband , and what they slowly worked onto the
linen they also stitched into their minds as a subject they’d want to return to
and say more about.

But there
may have been, short of effects of indoctrination, some fun to be had in
working these figures. It was probably fun to be judicious about doing the
naked figures with suitable decency, and the serpent was a joy to work,
wriggling in the tree.

On the
wonderful Google Art Project, several such samplers can be seen. On the 18th
of April 1737 Margaret Grant began her work, aged just nine. Perhaps the
materials for making her sampler were a birthday present. She will use silk and
linen threads in many colours, it’s a big project, with an outlay involved. It’s
easy to imagine that work on the sampler inaugurated the girl’s own sewing box,
and her mother passing on some material, but also buying new to set the project
off to a good start.

But
Margaret, obviously a painstaking child, went far beyond the usual proof of
being able to read in displaying the conventional elements in a sampler of an
alphabet and her name: she included a whole poem

How soon, poore Adam, was thy Freedome lost!
Forfeit to death ere thou hadst time to boast;
Before thy Triumph, was thy Glory done,
Betwixt a rising and a setting Sun:
How soon that ends, that should have ended never!
Thine eyes nere slept, untill they slept for ever.

The poem was first published in Quarles’ Divine Fancies
in 1632, but that was an astonishingly popular work, going through edition
after edition. (On EEBO I see 1632, 33, 41, 52, 53, 57, 58, 60, 64, 65, 71, 75,
there might have been more, clearly if a 17th century household had
a book of verse, it was quite likely to be this). Resonantly gloomy, the poem
briefly expresses (and finds relish in expressing) the commonly agreed view
that Adam and Eve fell on their first day in Paradise. It’s not a view that
enhances anyone’s sense of God’s sense of proportion, but it seems as though
anxiety about Adam and Eve sleeping together, and immediately conceiving a
child while sinless, alarmed everyone to thinking it was all over between 9am
and 3pm (or similar). There was also that inveterate desire to read the Old
Testament typologically, so the sequence of events in the original sin must
match the time taken for Christ to die on the Cross, in redeeming that sin.

Lord; if our
FatherAdam could not stay
In his upright perfection,
one poor day;How can it be expected, we
have powerTo
hold out Siege, one scruple of an hour …

exclaims Quarles in his Meditation 21 (“See, how the crafty
Serpent, twists and windes/ Into the brest of man!”, etc).

A nine year old slowly stitches out this horrible ‘wisdom’,
product of so much hard-driven extrapolation from the Bible. Quarles, wanting a
strongly conclusive final couplet, leaves Adam dead and unredeemed, a first man
who lost his freedom before he could formulate an appreciation of it, and who
never knew any triumph.

Monday, September 23, 2013

An interesting weekend for me: on Saturday, I was one of the group of old members of the college had taken up the invitation to return to Jesus College on (just about) the 40th anniversary of our matriculation.Here I am at breakfast: 'Self portrait in a convex teapot':

On Sunday morning, despite feeling that port has yet to have its moment as an energy drink, I drove out to Eynsham, got my second best bicycle out of the car, and headed off to Chastleton House (NT). It's a lovely old place, and my sister last year was re-gilding the clock face from the courtyard, so I was minded to see that back in place. But I got there early, and was going to have to wait three-quarters of an hour with a dreadful thirst, so I switched to Chipping Norton, where I felt sure there would be a cafe, and where I was minded to see the Rickards tomb in the church:

It is beautifully done, though like many of these things, it has attracted the graffiti of idling youths with knives in their pockets. I wonder if it were fully restored, would a restorer have to leave the incised graffiti, which have become a kind of town record?

The tomb side tells us that Thomas Rickards had died in 1579. Elizabeth Rickards, nee Fiennes, lived until 1603, but was still living when the monument was erected, and they never got round to filling in the blanks - but that she would not outlive the millenium had occurred to the person doing the lettering:

As usual, the drapery on the recumbent figures does not hang, and I can only suppose that this shows the strength of conventional depiction: whoever executed this fine piece of sculpture would have been able to render hanging drapery, but somehow that would not have done. Elizabethans liked the starchy look. This is the mastiff at Elizabeth's feet.

I then decided to loop back to Spelsbury, where John Wilmot, Lord Rochester is buried. I didn't know if there would be a ledger slab, or a wall memorial. In fact, neither: Rochester was placed in a vault under the church. This had been opened back in the 1960's or 70's, and the coffin lid's brass plate, a memorial plate from the coffin, and a lead tablet from his wife's grave were taken and put on display inside the church:

The vault was entered from the north side of the church: I went to have a look, and noticed that the cement holding the quite ordinary garden centre paving slabs that covered the vault entrance was completely loose, and the slabs cracked. I lifted two pieces aside:

Below, I could see that an iron grating was propped against the passageway into the vault underneath the church:

And at this moment, common sense prevailed: if I squeezed into this narrow gap, and got stuck down there, nobody knew where I was, there was no mobile phone signal even at ground level, I had no torch, and why on earth did I think that visiting Milord's pocky bones was a good idea? ... Dead, we become the Lumber of the World,And to that Mass of matter shall be swept,Where things destroy'd, with things unborn, are kept.Devouring time, swallows us wholeImpartialDeath, confounds, Body, and Soul.

It would, arguably, have been a suitable end for a literary scholar ('After a long search, Dr Booth's remains were found in the vault where the libertine poet, John Wilmot, had been buried in 1680. He was still clutching Rochester's pelvis.')

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Nicholas Billingsley began working on
his The Infancy of the World (1658) when he was only fifteen. It had
probably been set aside for some while when, gratified by the reception of his
work, Brachy-martyrologia, or, A breviary of
all the greatest persecutions which have befallen the saints and people of God
from the creation to our present times paraphras'd by Nicholas Billingsly(a versification of Foxe full of hideous
relish for suffering, and for divine retributions on the tormentors), Billingsley realized he could delight his
new readers with a swift return to the press if he finished his poem on the
Creation. I doubt that he did much re-working, he more probably looked back
over his early work to check it was clear of unwise theological speculations or
lines that might be misconstrued.

As a literary work, it has some
interest, mainly negative. There was nothing here for Milton to learn from, but
the outputs of eager and pious poetasters like Peyton and Billingsley do remind
us that Milton was going to enter quite a crowded literary field. The
generation brought up on du Bartas would naturally think of Genesis as a poetic
subject. We can learn too from what Billingsley doesn’t do with his creation
narrative: the direction he took was towards the pious encyclopaedia, rather
than entering into the intellectual drama of the Fall.

The main part of the work consists,
perhaps surprisingly, of eight sections – one would have expected six, as he is
dealing with the six days’ labours from Genesis I. His sections consist of the
start of creation (as in Milton, apparently not ex nihilo, but order
created out of a material chaos), and the separation of the waters,
corresponding to verses 1-9. Then, furnishing the earth with trees and flowers
(Genesis I, 11-13); section 3, the heavens (I 14-5); the sun and moon (I 16-9);
the waters populated with fish occupies his fifth section, and the birds in his
sixth – the material for both sections comes from Genesis I 20-3. The seventh
section is the creation of the animals, and the eighth, of course, Adam and
Eve.

To round off what he had achieved,
Billingsley ventured into the Fall itself:

An Appendix
Of God’s resting day.
Of Eden garden.
Of Man’s happiness before his fall.
Of Man’s misery after his fall.

His treatment of the fall borders on the
cursory: this is the Fall of Adam. Eve is talking

Like
Stanley Holloway’s lion, Wallace, swallowing Albert, ‘ ’E were sorry the
moment’e’d done it’. Maybe Billingsley
had seen one of those depictions of the temptation where Adam turns away,
clutching at his throat after his first bite.

As
you will have noticed, Billingsley adopted loose rhymed couplets. Here are some
examples of him at work:

The vocabulary has its freakish moments too:

“Under him Scorpio exporrected lies”
(a Latinism, ‘stretched out’).

“Phæbus his refulgent face,The upper and the lower world doth grace,With equal splendor; his irradient beamsRefresheth all things; his ignivomous teams

Run
restless races…”

(another
Latinism, and altogether a typical 17th century English word,
well-evidenced in the OED: ‘fire-vomiting’)

That God should
address Eve as ‘nefarious woman’ now sounds odd to us, as the word has become
comic, but the basic sense of ‘offending against the moral law’ makes perfect
sense:
“Nefarious woman, ah! what hast thou done,That thus my awful presence thou dost shun?”

Billingsley’s mind moves instantly from the examples
of God’s profuse creation to the wondrous behaviours these animals exhibit in
the postlapsarian world. He isn’t troubled about what the birds, fish and
beasts did, behaviourally speaking, prior to the Fall. The author himself had
experienced desperate ill-health when young, and is recurrently emphatic of the
curative things a provident God has placed in His creation: the congregation of
the waters leads Billingsley rapidly onto an enumeration of the curative wells,
and it rather sounds as though he had spent his time at Tunbridge and Bath
taking the waters, and the herbs are all orientated to cures

Of Tunbridg famous in our Kentish
county,For casting up their subterraneous bounty,Which relishing of Iron, and sulph’ry veinesCures well nigh all infirmities and paines,Nay lengthens life causing the fates t’unspinLifes drawn out thred, hath any got the spleen?The dropsie? the vertigo? or the stone?These waters will yield remedy alone.Suppose th’art Lunatick, or Planet struck,Hear’s that will help thee, if thou hast the
luckTo come and take it …

Gouts, schyaticas, the French-mans
pox,And what flows from Pandora’s opened boxThese Springs resist…

One thing that had not struck me
before about these minor hexameral works – though it’s obvious enough – in both
Peyton and Billingsley, their subject allows, even requires, the author to say
his piece about Sabbath observance – and they both take a very insistent
attitude about the sanctity of the holy day of rest. Milton doesn’t do this. At
the end of His week of creation, God returns to elaborate praise in Heaven:

So
sung they, and the Empyrean rung, VII
633WithHallelujahs: Thus was Sabbath kept.And thy request think nowfulfill’d, thatask’dHow first this World and face of things began…

And
there it is where it should be, biblically speaking, but Milton certainly
doesn’t use this as a soap-box to insist on Sabbath observance. Not that this
is a surprise in Milton.

Among Billingsley’s lines about the
subject of the Sabbath day are these odd couplets – he is describing the waters
of the world, and among the rivers, he gets to the Thames. He praises the
watermen shooting London Bridge, and then says:

Great London is the Bow, the Thames
the stringThe Boats are arrows which about do springThe Streams Sabbatical do rest and stay.In observation of the Sabbath day.

He
couldn’t really have thought that the tides in London stopped for the Sabbath,
could he? Maybe - Billingsley was very pious (he would go on, as a clergyman,
to have a lot of trouble conforming to the Church of England), and seems
credulous of wonders he had picked up from books.

The
largest portion of this whole work consists of a series of rhymed lists of the
things and beings God has created. Dealing with the waters, Billingsley
compiles seas, rivers, wells, until he admits his reading can carry him no
further, and it’s time for him to turn in anyway:

Next section, he busily lists trees, herbs and
flowers, then on to the constellations and planets, section 5 has a long list
of fish, 6, birds, 7, beasts. About all these aspects of creation, Billingsley
is fideistic:

Look here, look there, nay turne I
where I willI see Gods greatness and his goodness still.

and willing therefore to believe any kind of wonders
about whatever aspect it is of God’s mysterious design:

The envious Peacock hideth out of
spightHis med’cinable dung from humane sight:Treads softly like a theif, but from his throatYels out a horible Tartarian note …

Pliny asserted that the peacock
deliberately devoured its own dung; dried dung of peacocks seems to appear in
most of the pharmacopeias. It was more effective if it was white, apparently.
(I have a notion that bird poo contains vitamin B12, but this is not an idea on
which I am prepared to act.)

Here he retails, quite
uncritically, all the old lore about hyenas:

Alternately his sex Hyæna changes,His eyes assume all colours which as strange is;Such Dogs as on his shadow light grow dumb:His feet stick fast whoever sees him come;Calling the shepherds from their thatched
bowers,He slayes them, and their slautered Corps
devours…

The
elephant, meanwhile, understands human language, has its own elephantine faith,
and is a royalist:

The Elephant next claimeth
excellence,This beast comes nearest unto humane sense;He knows his country speech, he’s us’d in warrs,He worshipeth the Sun, the Moon, the Starrs.The greatest of all beasts the earth doth hold,He’s proud of trappings wrought with burnish’d
goldAdores the King, his most ambitious spiritAspires to glory, glory to inherit.

Maybe
I am being severe on Billingsley. If Pseudodoxia Epidemica, published in
1646, does not seem to have come his way, even if Browne dismisses the nonsense
about the elephant’s legs having no joints, he was himself willing to credit
elephants as writers and speakers, as they enjoy a ‘proximity of reason’:

“That some Elephants
have not only written whose sentences, as Aelian ocularly testifieth, but have
also spoken, as Oppianus delivereth, and Christophorus a Costa particularly
relateth … we doe not conceive impossible; nor beside the affinity of reason in
this Animall any such intolerable incapacity in the organs of divers other
Quadrupedes, whereby they might not be taught to speake, or become imitators of
speech like birds; and indeed strange it is how the curiosity of men that have
been active in the instruction of beasts, have never fallen upon this artifice,
and among those many paradoxicall and unheard of imitations, should not attempt
to make one speak; the Serpent that spake unto Eve, the Dogs & Cats, that
usually speak unto Witches, might afford some encouragement, and since broad
and thick chops are required in birds that speake, since lips and teeth are
also organs of speech; from these there is also an advantage in quadrupedes,
and a proximity of reason in Elephants and Apes above them all.”

But occasionally Billingsley the fifteen year old appears in his verse:

“The Stockfish is a fish that wil
not boylUnless you beat it with a stick a while”

Billingsley
does not seem to have registered that dried cod needs to be tenderized before
cooking, that you can’t just boil it without doing this first seems to have
stuck in his mind as a miraculous property of something called a ‘stockfish’.

As I said, Billingsley added an appendix about the
Fall to his poem about the Creation. here, he daringly ventures into dialogue.

God and Adam he treats using a figure of the two as
landlord and tenant:

Of all the trees that in the
Orchard beI set them for thy use, one only treeShall be my rent; that tree thou shalt not tast,Which in the center of the garden’s plac’dThe rest are freely thine, by my permission,Rent-free: but yet on an imply’d condition:What I injoyne be studious to fulfill,Touch not the tree of knowledg, good, and ill;For by my sacred majesty, I vow,And by my venerable name, if thouBreak but thy Lease, “thy very lips that shall“Let in this fruit, shall let in death withal.But if thou please me well, this tree shal beA sacred pledg between thy God, and thee.

At this point, Billingsley opts to make Satan into a
bad Cavalier poet:

Coy woman tast, behold their beautifulAnd cherry cheeks, coy woman do but pull.Cannot those mellow-delicates, inviteYour wat’ring palate, to an appetite?Methinkes they should, taste, and you shall have
skil,To know the diference 'twixt good, and ill.Why draw’st thou back?

To
the possessed Snake,The cred’lous woman this reply did make.Eve.Wisest of beasts, all that you speak is true,You counsel for the best, all thanks be due,For your great love your love which doth
transcendAll merit of mine, thanks to my loyal friend:My life’s to small to hazard for your ease,Friend I could give’t, your speeches doe so
please.This fruit is marv’lous pleasing to the eye;And questionless, 'tis to the taste: I’ll try.And eat thereof and give my husbandAdam.Serpent.They bow to serve you, at your pleasure, Madam.Eve.Ah! how delitious is this fruit, how sweet!A finer Apple I did never eat …

The commendatory verses Billingsley solicited from fellow
students and relatives are kind, and lay judicious stress on his youth. If we
made him touch Josuah Sylvester’s corpse, asks William Jacob, would it cry out
‘murder!’? No, not a bit of it. John Swan notes that

Whiles others of thine age mispent theirtimes

In toys and pastimes, thou in sacred Rhimes

Applied thy self …

D.R. of Merton College says that this ‘accurate’ poem that
it confutes Epicurean atomism.